SunGard Equips its Hosted iWorks Prophet Actuarial Solution with Grid Computing Capacity

Wayne, Pa.-based SunGard has added more than 500 cores to a grid computing cluster setup to host SunGard's iWorks Prophet actuarial solution, the enterprise risk management application in the iWorks solution suite. SunGard iWorks is a business-driven IT product suite for the insurance industry in the life, health, annuities, pensions, property and casualty, and reinsurance areas.

The grid combines technology from Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and Intel. It uses Sun Microsystems' Sun Blade X6250 server modules, Intel's Quad-Core Xeon processors and software from Microsoft to achieve high-performance computing capacity that facilitates the development, execution and support of actuarial models. The use of network-distributed parallel processing clusters, which can be integrated into any Microsoft-based platform, will help improve processing times for real-time risk management, says the company. SunGard plans to expand this environment to accommodate a services offering whereby users may lease cores when needed.

"Insurance companies are looking to this fast-growing trend of analytics and predictive modeling as part of the risk management process that helps improve performance and takes advantage of the high-performance computing (HPC) that is now available," said David Piesse, head of insurance, Sun Microsystems. "Thanks to the advent of HPC and our work with leading application vendors like SunGard, this collaboration will help insurance firms to deliver results more quickly and meet solvency standards more efficiently."

Peggy Bresnick Kendler has been a writer for 30 years. She has worked as an editor, publicist and school district technology coordinator. During the past decade, Bresnick Kendler has worked for UBM TechWeb on special financialservices technology-centered ... View Full Bio